thoughton:digitallife Installing MT-Blacklist

Installing MT-Blacklist

I've been attempting to install Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist in order to help deal with comment spam. However, despite widespread acclaim I found this software quite badly documented and hard to install. The help forums were notably unhelpful - they are full of people requesting help and little to nothing in the way of answers. That said, this is free software and I suppose one can't expect too much.

After precisely following instructions and installing the software (including installing Storable.pm) I ended up with an error when I tried to load mt-bl-config.cgi ("Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/extlib/File/Spec/Unix.pm line 78."). According to Jay Allen this is a "superfluous perl warning". Whatever it is, MT-Blacklist simply doesn't work. No matter what I click, it takes me to a login page which doesn't allow any logins. Using my Movable Type login and password merely causes the page to reload. Interestingly, using any other login information results in a red box saying 'Invalid Login'. So obviously I am using the correct password information, there's just something broken in MT-Blacklist.

One of the suggestions in the help forums (in reply to someone else's problem) was to simply reinstall MT-Blacklist. I wasted a couple of hours and did so, only to get to the loading stage (running mt-bl-config.cgi) be greeted by a message to the effect that there were pre-existing MT-Blacklist entries in the MySQL database which needed to be removed. After spending a fruitless hour searching for an idiot's guide on command-line commands to drop tables from a MySQL database, I ended up installing phpMyAdmin following these instructions. After that ordeal trying to load phpMyAdmin resulted in this error: " The configuration file now needs a secret passphrase (blowfish_secret).". A quick google led me to this page where I found the solution. Finally, something that worked! Like so much other unix software, this whole ordeal has been a case of 'one step forward, two steps back.'

Unfortunately, after removing the old MySQL tables and reloading MT-Blacklist, I'm getting the exact same problem as before - no matter what I click I get taken to a non-responsive login page. As you can imagine, this is intensely annoying :-) If anyone has a clue, I'd love to hear from them!